Monday, 31 March 2014

Cole Cake

My parents flew in to Melbourne the day after my birthday and seeing as I didn't have cake on my actual birthday (too busy gorging ourselves at Gazi) I decided to make one.

I always put a lot of thought into birthday cakes. I try to come up with something different, usually a fusion of a few recipes, and unique to the birthdayee. So for myself I considered my favourite things which at the moment are peanut butter & nutella and I adore a good cream cheese icing.

I started off with a cake recipe I have adapted from all recipes (I reduced the sugar a bit and made the mixture slightly less runny). I love this recipe because it uses olive oil instead of butter and is nicely rich without feeling stodgy (that is, until you coat it in peanut butter and Nutella).

You will need:

Cake:

1 3/4 cups SR flour

2 Tbsp cornflour (optional, but helps make your cake fluffy)

3/4 cup cocoa

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

2 eggs, beaten

1 cup milk

1/2 cup olive oil

1 tsp vanilla essence

3/4 cup boiling water

Filling:

Kraft Whipped peanut butter

Icing:

250g cream cheese

1/3 cup nutella (or to taste)

2 Tbsp icing sugar

1 tsp cocoa powder

You can make this without the icing sugar and cocoa powder but the icing sugar is there to add structure and fluffiness and the cocoa powder combats the sweetness.

Method:

Preheat oven to 180C and grease and line one or two cake tins (use 2 if you are short on time as this takes a while to cook)

Sift flour and cocoa into a large bowl, stir in sugars, add eggs, milk and olive oil and mix well with electric mixer until well combined.

Add vanilla and boiling water and beat for 3 minutes.

Pour into tin and bake for one hour (less if using 2 tins- I start checking mine at about 50 minutes but it usually takes about 1 hour 10 mins)

Cool in tin for 20 minutes before turning out onto a cooling rack. Allow to cool completely before icing.

The icing is super easy to make. Just allow the cream cheese to soften at room temperature and beat with the Nutella, icing sugar and cocoa until well mixed and fluffy.

Cut the dome off the top of the cake to make it look prettier when iced, and cut your cake in half

Pull out your jar of whipped peanut butter. This stuff is the bomb- a little sweeter than regular peanut butter with a beautiful fluffy texture.

Spread thickly on your bottom layer.

Pop on the top layer and cover everything in the Nutella cream cheese

I added some halved caramel Lindt balls for decoration

Sadly this cake is poisonous for dogs so Ted missed out (he did score a bit of peanut butter though).

I may be a little older than 5

Dressed in my trackie ready for cake-eating

Happy birthday to me :)

Despite his eye-rolling about the peanut-butter-Nutellaness of the cake, the bookworm seemed to enjoy it too...

*Cole has always been the shortened version of my name for my family. I am definitely not one of nature's Nicky's.